Posts by lorisarvendu

Re: Wot no Picard?

"Well then why did the article mention season two and three at all?!? We should only talk about those next year and two years from now!"

For the same reason the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who referenced every season from 1963 to 2013. It was one series. TOS and TNG aren't. They are separate series in the same franchise.

Re: Wot no Picard?

"Is there a Part 2 coming about TNG? Pleeease say there is...

Pleeease..."

Since the article is specifically about how 2016 is 50 years since TOS first aired, you will probably have to wait until 2037 for your Part 2. Sorry.

Re: Simple is best

You may be right but how about just Essex? Gets my vote.

Oi! My unmarried daughter lives in Essex with her 3 kids!...oh...wait...

Re: ac: Let's hope

"Also a a fellow commentard has pointed out, if the votes were totted up in the same manner as a general election, it would have been significantly more in favour of leave!"

Alternately if a General Election were totted up in the same manner as a Referendum, we might not have a Conservative Government.

Re: Parliamentary negligence

"The reason why a referendum to change the status quo should have a substantial majority is to ensure that the country as a whole is sufficiently behind such a commitment and is prepared to accept the consequences if the reality isn't what they expected. The vote shows it isn't."

Agreed. The Referendum is incorrectly seen as a fork in the road, with either direction being of equal validity, and involving equal and opposite consequence. It wasn't. It was a slip road on a motorway, with the choice being "continue and nothing changes" or "take the next exit".

The very words "stay" or "leave" show this. If you decide to sell your house and move, or stay in it; if you decide to leave your job or stay; if you decide to divorce your partner, or remain married, you're not at a fork in a road. Nobody would accept that these life-changing examples should be equally weighted, so why should the Referendum?

Re: Let's hope

"How dare you suggest such a thing! Rhubarb rhubarb, undemocratic, rhubarb rhubarb, take back control, rhubarb rhubarb, make Britain great again!"

You forgot "will of the people" dude!

Re: Simple solution...

"Either you have an inordinate amount of relatives spread over a large age-range, or they live somewhere where time works differently to the rest of us!"

I'm 54 years old. I have 3 children, 3 grandchildren, 2 nephews, 1 niece, 4 cousins, and 2 great-nephews under the age of 2. So yes I do see new pictures and videos every day. I assure you this isn't an unusual amount of relatives and time works perfectly normally where they are.

Re: Simple solution...

"Of course, if you really like the "Facebook experience," that may be worth it to you, so your mileage may vary. My wife would be lost without it, and many others fall into that category. But I can't imagine wanting to use it or anything that basically sells my personal data to make money (bad enough), then wants to make yet MORE money by shoving ads at me that I can't block. Of course, this is an accepted business model - see Google et al."

I'm quite happy for Facebook to see my personal data to make money, since the only data they are selling is my anonymous Facebook account data. I have no data on my profile about where I work, what part of the country I'm in, or even my true age (I had to put something down, so input 1st January 1980). I had an argument with someone at work about this recently. They claimed that we were slurping data about our users, while I tried to point out that all they were picking up was our users' account names, which were linked to nothing about their actual real identities. He still didn't accept that N0458301942@our.company.co.uk didn't tell anyone anything about the person who the username belonged to, since it wasn't linked to their real name, address, age, sex, political affliation...in short nothing worthwhile.

Going back to the ads though, there are two extremes here - legitimate web sites that have to use advertising and banners (remember them?) to generate revenue to offset the masses of free traffic that the site owner has to pay for, while at the other end we have sites that are practically unreadable through endless pop-ups and secondary pages that obscure the single page you actually want to read. Ad-blockers were created in response to the second of these, while unfortunately also scuppering the first.

Facebook's ads can be annoying, but they appear to try and tread a middle ground between giving you the experience you want (and keeping you using the service) and funding the very page that you use for free.

The alternative to this is the Paywall model, which should give a relatively ad-free experience, but which of course people also object to. "The Web Should Be Free!" they cry, ignoring the fact that it costs money to deliver web content, and where's that money going to come from? If ad-blockers had existed twenty years ago, sites like Twitter and Facebook (hell, even Google and Yahoo) probably wouldn't exist by now. And before you say that might be a good thing, bollocks to you. My Facebook friends list consists almost entirely of my extended family who are spread out all over the country, and there isn't a day goes by that I don't get to see and enjoy photos and videos of my young nephews, neices and cousins as they learn to walk and talk, play in their gardens, start at their new schools, attend their proms, graduate from their Universities, and eventually post their own videos of themselves getting wasted in fancy dress.

You can't send 10 minute videos of junior winning the egg and spoon race at Sports Day by email, and you certainly can't send it through a land-line.

The world is full of ads, from billboards to shop-windows, to newspapers and magazines. Facebook is no different.

Re: @ Archtech Thank you Mr.Farage

"The Brexit campaign were told repeatedly that the £350 million figure was inaccurate and misleading. Yet they stuck with it right up to the day after the vote. Is that not dishonest?"

I suspect they were strapped for cash and it would have cost too much to repaint the bus.

Re: Thank you Mr.Farage

" We pay more than we receive, its not too tricky to work out we can divert some of that cash to ourselves and if the eu are breaking their own rules we need to stop paying now."

That endlessly repeated mantra of "we put more in than we get out, that's unfair" cracks me up. As if every single member country in the EU could get more out than they put in. How exactly would that work? From what I can see Germany and France pay more than the UK but I don't see us fighting their corner.

It's like someone with a well-paid job complaining about their Income Tax, while pointing at those with low-paid jobs who receive more in Benefit than they pay in Tax, and saying "why can't we all get out more than we put in?"

Re: The current plan does not matter

"Despite that, most of the electorate did want it, however. What you are suggesting is that politicians ignore the the explicitly declared will of the people, because they (or perhaps you) know better."

We elect MPs because we hope they will form a Government that does know better than us. In this case I will still have to trust that they do. Because although someone may believe that they know better than the Government how to run a country, that doesn't mean they do.

If a significant number of 600 member of Parliament vote to ignore the Referendum and not trigger the Exit process, then we have to believe that they may know better than us. Just because 52% of the public voted to Leave doesn't make them right, and doesn't mean it would be the best decision for the UK, any more than the 48% who voted Remain are right as well.

We have to trust our democratically elected Parliament to lead us in this, because if we don't, what the hell is the point in having our current voting system anyway? Unless you're just going solely on the numbers and saying 17.4 million Leave votes trumps at most 600 MPs?

"I'm not sure that's accurate, as I understand it MEP's only get to vote on laws that are proposed by the EU Commission/Council/Whatever which is the same amount of power as our House of Lords has, they cannot propose laws themselves. Whereas our MP's do make the laws, even opposition MP's can bring a private member's bill to be voted on."

You're probably right there. Though they do have more power than the House of Lords because if just one country's representative votes no, then the law isn't passed. Every country has the option of Veto on every law. Brexiters often quote that the UK has had a Veto taken away, but as I understand it that is on certain economic matters of the Euro, meaning that the UK should have no say in laws applicable only to the Eurozone, which we're not a part of.

Another point that I keep hearing is that the UK only has until 2020 before it will be forced to accept the Euro. However I have been unable to find any factual documentation to back this up. If there was any hard evidence that our Eurozone opt-out had a time limit, then I'm sure both Leavers and Remainers would have posted links to it, and yet there's nothing but hearsay. In fact this Telegraph article from 2014 implies that we won't be forced to join (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/10935617/After-2020-all-EU-members-will-have-to-adopt-the-euro.html):

"...by 2020, all but five member states of the EU are due to be euro members and Poland is likely to join by then as well, leaving just the UK, Denmark, Sweden and Bulgaria outside."

"The people who make the laws are not elected by the people, they are elected by other politicians who might be elected by the people. Now I don't know about the rest of you but that's not bloody well good enough for me!"

Not strictly true. MEPs make the laws, and all UK citizens can vote for their MEP (that's how UKIP got theirs in). However, you raise a point that may be at the heart of disillusionment with UK politics.

Namely that in our Local and General Elections you can only vote for the people that your particular Political Party puts forward. So although you think you've got a free democratic vote, you have no choice in what candidates you can vote for, and if you don't particularly like the representative of your particular Party affiliation, then you're in the same boat.

Of course perfectly principled candidates do often come up, but since they're almost always independents with nowhere near the campaigning power of a major Political Party, hardly anyone is even aware of them, let alone votes for them.

It's obvious this is the case, because you only have to look at any particularly despised member of the current (or any previous) Government. If everyone hates IDS or Theresa May or Michael Gove, why were they elected? A significant amount of their Constituents voted for them, probably because in the UK most people vote for the Party, regardless of whether they like the candidates on their ballot paper or not.

Strictly speaking the British Public didn't elect David Cameron as Prime Minister. His constituents only voted him a seat in Parliament. It was his Party who voted him as Leader.

In fact isn't the US system a bit like this as well? US citizens don't vote for their President, they vote for Electors, who are actually the ones who vote.

Re: how it feel to to be wrenched back from an even more definite terminal event.

"... or, as the article posits, possibly wrenched back from someone else's terminal event..."

Presumably a large amount of memories would still be intact, otherwise the reanimated adult would have no idea how to speak, use their limbs, or possibly even breathe. Which sounds all rather familiar - person reanimated after fatal accident, with memories of past life but new personality. Very Doctor Who...apart from the change in appearance of course.

Re: Want to increase your personal call stats?

"Minimum call duration.

Dropped call after 20 seconds = 60 seconds of moolah."

Correct. 49p a minute. Minimum 1 minute. Plus most of our calls could have been answered within a couple of minutes. So these punters paid the first 49p for the privilege of getting no help at all.

Even sadder was the day the phone bills came in. We got several calls of this ilk:

Us: "Good morning....blah blah...49p a minute, how can I help you?"

Caller: "Hello? What's this number on my phone bill? Why have i been charged £6?"

Us: "This is the XXX Help Line, sir/madam. Have you recently bought one of our computers?"

What would invariably follow would be another couple of minutes of complaints about why the call cost so much, and hadn't they paid enough for the computer, and anyway it should be free. Eventually they would hang up grudgingly, after accepting that perhaps their son/daughter/wife/husband had called (and not realising they had just cost themselves another couple of quid).

We knew that they would be back in 3 months time, when their next phone bill arrived.

Want to increase your personal call stats?

Well then, do what a work colleague of mine used to. Back in about '93 I worked on a 49p a minute IT support line. We had a call monitoring system and you would be taken to task if you spent too long on calls (you know, like trying to actually help the customer, duh) and therefore took too few. A guy who sat opposite me would regularly disconnect his headset while listening to a punter, watch his phone LED until the call was dropped (i.e. the punter got sick of saying "hello? Hello?..." and hung up) and then reconnect. Punter just assumed the call had got disconnected, rang back and got another operator. Company got a bit more money and my work colleague's call stats went up, and his average time on calls was nice and low. Everyone wins eh?

Needless to say he was never found out and possibly still does it to this day. Twat.

Re: The Problem with the EU

Remember... Brits (like me) living on the continent receive child benefit in the country where they work / reside.

So here's a suggestion. From your "0.002% goes abroad" number, subtract the amount paid by European governments to Brits working/residing in Europe.

I don't know how outdated this is (it's 2013) but the Telegraph helpfully listed benefits available in other EU countries, and yes it does appear that in a lot of cases Brits working abroad are also claiming Child Benefit for their dependents who live in the UK. Sauce for the Goose etc.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/10391238/Benefits-in-Europe-country-by-country.html

Re: Well...

I'm not a radiohead fan but now I'm just curious to go watch the video anyway.

As they say there no such thing as bad publicity..

Personally I thought it was a bit "nice video, shame about the song", but that may just be my taste. Your mileage may vary.